Seminary Leaves Its Nest

Students and staff at the Bethany Theological Seminary grumble about the gaggle of geese that roam the Lombard school's 51 pastoral acres.

The Federal Express man has to dodge their sidewalk droppings. At this year's graduation, a father goose protecting his nest menaced visitors.

Now, at last, jokes President Eugene Roop, he can esape the pesky flock by leaving no forwarding address.

This summer, the Church of the Brethren's only seminary is packing up a 30-year history in DuPage County, leaving its nine-building campus with ponds and willow trees for a lone brick building in Richmond, Ind.

For years, administrators and faculty have known they would be forced to move, Roop said. The cost of maintaining such expansive quarters for 90 graduate students drove the seminary into debt in the late 1970s.

Even jokes about the geese don't entirely mask Roop's melancholy.

"You can't walk around these buildings without feeling the loss," said Roop, who was also one of the school's first graduates. "This is home."

In 1963, the Church of the Brethren, with roots in 18th Century Germany and colonial America, moved its seminary from Chicago to the former soybean fields at Butterfield and Meyers Roads.

It bought more than 100 acres, a large parcel of which was sold to the Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Another chunk eventually became part of nearby Yorktown Shopping Center, Lombard's largest retail plaza.

If a proposal wending its way through village channels is approved, the second-largest center-412,700 square feet-will go up on the Bethany seminary site. The plan would include a Kmart, four other stores and three restaurants, said Jeff Coder, Lombard's community development director.

The first public hearing earlier this month drew a crowd of 300, many of them shopped-out, traffic-weary residents opposed to another retail center.

Last week, Target Stores requested a public hearing to open another store closer to the Yorktown center, though not on the Bethany property, Coder said.

Warren Groff was dean when the seminary, which dates to 1905, relocated from downtown Chicago. He served 14 years as the school's president and taught his last theology course this month. He said he has witnessed "phenomenal" growth in DuPage the last three decades.

But he's not sure whether to laugh or cry at the prospect of 1,800 parking spots cropping up where the chapel, administration building and classrooms now stand.

"We were kidding each other on the way in today," Groff said, referring to his wife, Ruth, who was helping pack books in his office. "If a Kmart or Target moves in, will we shop there or not?"

Still, said Groff, who is retiring, "There is a sadness to it. It really marks part of a passing era."

The move is also part of a slow but growing trend among smaller seminaries of different denominations to share campus services to contain costs, Roop explained.

The new Brethren seminary is on land leased from the Society of Friends, or Quakers. The site already houses the Quaker-affiliated Earlham School of Religion and undergraduate Earlham College.

Bethany's relocation to a region with 57 Brethren churches, more than seven times the number in the Chicago area, will also allow the school to shift its focus from the classroom to hands-on ministry, Roop said.

After 30 years and little money for repairs, the campus is showing signs of wear. Many roofs leak; pavement has buckled. Some of the furniture, including the chapel organ and solid oak chairs Roop sat on as a seminarian, has held up and will make the 275-mile move.

But even the students-38 years old on average and nearly half of them women- are bracing for a different atmosphere.

Cheryl Cayford, 30, is halfway through the seminary's three-year program. Already out of college for several years, she initially balked at the idea of living on the Lombard campus. But the experience, she said, enriched her education. She is saddened that the new site, with its 24,000-square-foot building, is without student housing.

"Here you're in this kind of island oasis in the middle of suburbia. You share lives in a way that probably doesn't happen in normal life," Cayford said. "We will have to work twice as hard to create it (in Richmond)."

Groff cast the move in a philosophical light.

"As beautiful as the buildings are, and as sad as it will be to see it all torn down, the purpose is not confined to bricks and mortar," he said. "It's a service of God and neighbor, really."